Life, as understood by Logan Mountstuart, is a series of random events, not events which are fated, controlled by a higher power, or the result of carefully made decisions. But Mountstuart also believes that one can look for and find the extraordinary within the ordinary. Through his personal journals, begun in 1923, when he is seventeen, and continuing to the time of his death in 1991, we come to know Mountstuart intimately, both as an individual, growing and changing, and as an Everyman, someone who participates in and is affected by the seminal events of the 20th century, after World War I. Because he is a writer, he is able to meet Aldous Huxley, Ernest Hemingway (whom he confuses with F. Scott Fitzgerald), Virginia Woolf, Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, and Ian Fleming, the reader has the vicarious fun of being there and meeting them, too, since Mountstuart seems very much like the rest of us. He buys early paintings by friends Paul Klee and Juan Gris, and Pablo Picasso draws a quick portrait of him and signs it. During World War II, Ian Fleming, who works for the Secret Service, gets Mountstuart a job in Naval Intelligence, where he spies on the Duke of Windsor. After the war, his peripatetic life continues to other continents. Entertaining and fast-paced, despite its length.
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The Girl on the Train, a debut thriller from England, features three women, one of whom becomes the victim of murder in this plot which has no heroes or heroines, no Superman or Batgirl or brilliant detective to come flying to the rescue. To involve the reader, the author has had to choose a different way to counteract the absence of a hero, and she does so here in a most ironic way – by creating three main female characters, all of whom are weak, dependent, and dealing with personal problems involving husbands and lovers, past and present. The reader’s involvement, stimulated throughout by a sense of pity for these damaged women, depends upon an empathy with their psychological problems and the flawed decisions they make while affected by their problems. Rachel, the main character who introduces the novel, connects them all, structurally, through her train rides from the rural station where she has a room to her job in London. As she commutes, the train passes the house in the town of Witby, where she lived for five years with her husband Tom, and where he continues to live with his current wife Anna and their child. Four houses down the road from Tom and Anna, live a couple whom Rachel has named Jess and Jason, people she has never met but whose lives, as seen from the train, seem idyllic in the fantasy world which Rachel would like to believe parallels her own life with ex-husband Tom.
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Famous for his hilariously ironic comic sketches in Beyond the Fringe (1960), with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, and Peter Cook, and Talking Heads (1992); for his recent Tony Award-winning play The History Boys (2004), among other productions; and, most recently, his satiric novel (2007), An Uncommon Reader, about Queen Elizabeth’s discovery of a new kind of reading, Alan Bennett in this 1989 novella gives insights into his own life and personality. In The Lady in the Van, he details the relationship he had with someone who, under any other circumstances, would be considered a homeless person. In this case, Mary Shepherd is not really “homeless” because she lives, unkempt and unfettered, in a dilapidated van, painted yellow, “the papal color,” which she has parked illegally in various places throughout Bennett’s neighborhood. When she runs afoul of the parking regulations while her van is on a lot across the street from Bennett’s own house, Bennett offers to let her park the van temporarily in the garden entrance to his house. She stays for the next fifteen years, a woman so difficult that Bennett admits “one seldom was able to do her a good turn without thoughts of strangulation.”
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Reading this thriller is like reading an action film – an experience filled with non-stop drama, several different plot lines, quick changes of scene, numerous exotic settings, characters ranging from sick sociopaths to innocent children, and enough torture and gore to make one wretch. Opening with the point of view of Amy Boxer, the eighteen-year-old daughter of former investigator Charles Boxer and Detective Inspector Mercy Danquah, British author Robert Wilson brings the reader directly into the action. Amy, anxious to escape the boredom of her life and her parents expectations, has completely cleared all her belongings from her mother’s London apartment, a few things at a time, and has come up with what she regards as a fool-proof plan to run away and not be caught. She must be particularly careful to make no missteps. Her mother Mercy works with the Specialist Crime Directorate – the kidnap unit – and Amy not only wants to escape her life and vanish but, even more importantly, to embarrass her parents in the process.
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A View of the Harbour (1947), author Elizabeth Taylor’s third novel, employs the broadest focus of the four novels I have read by Taylor. Whereas the last and most famous novel published in her lifetime, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont(1971) concentrates on the relationship of one elderly woman, Mrs. Palfrey, who, nearing the end of her life befriends a callow young man who does not understand love, this much earlier novel reconstructs an entire community, the author’s goal being the depiction of its citizens and the values they celebrate. This creates challenges for the reader, initially, since s/he must try to remember the specific identities of a wide variety of townspeople, along with the relationships among them. Once the reader becomes familiar with this large cast of characters, the action devolves into an unusual kind of farce in which the author is more interested in illustrating the society and the people who must live in it as they search for love and connection, than in laughs for the sake of laughs. In fact, the humor involved in this farce is often bittersweet, more ironic than overt, with characters facing unhappiness and dashed hopes in their searches for happiness as often as they may find some kind of minimal happiness. The conclusion comes as a total surprise and provides the final irony.
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